Tag Archives: HAARP

Who ordered the Satanist New World Order with a side of general conspiracy theories? From Pizzagate, to government-controlled weather, to the insane Piers Morgan debate, Alex Jones is seriously… interesting. WatchMojo counts down ten ridiculous Alex Jones moments.

If there is a group of people I hate arguing with even more than I hate arguing with young-earth creationists, it’s the conspiracy theorists.

At least the young-earth creationists just think I’m working for Satan, a charge that I can understand, considering their view of things. Sure, we don’t accept the same ground rules for proof (evidence versus revelation); sure, we have different conclusions regarding where you can apply the laws of scientific inference (damn near everywhere versus only places where it doesn’t conflict with Holy Writ).

But at least we can talk. The conspiracy theorists, you can’t even have a civil discussion with. They accuse you of either being stupid or else working for evil humans, both of which are in my opinion worse than working for Satan because stupidity and evil humans actually exist. The worst part, though, is that they pretend to accept the principles of rational argument, but then when it comes down to the point, they don’t, really. You can bring out the best-researched study about the efficacy and safety of vaccines, the most convincing argument that 9/11 and Sandy Hook were not “inside jobs” or “false flags,” the most persuasive evidence out there that HAARP has nothing to do with raising tsunamis or causing earthquakes.

And where does it get you? They just write you off as a dupe or a shill. It’s the ultimate example of the False Dilemma Fallacy; if you don’t agree with us, you’re one of…. Them.

The problem in this country has gotten so bad that Kurt Eichenwald did a big piece in Vanity Fair on the topic this week, and you all should read it. In fact, everyone in the civilized world should read it, because it’s brilliant, even though it’s depressing. I’ll give you a brief passage from it, but then I want you to go to the link and read the whole thing:

(W)e have become scientific and political illiterates, and no nation can survive on a bedrock of such delusional stupidity. Of course, the 26 percent (or more) won’t believe me, if they manage to read this. I’ll just be deemed an “elitist” for daring to suggest that demon science and data, rather than ridiculous conspiracy theories, should be used to judge reality. So, it may be a losing battle, but we should all try. I don’t want to be forced, someday, to stand by as the rest of the world renames our nation “America the Ignorant.”

It’s a bit of a coincidence that I should come across this when I did, because it came on the heels of another article, one sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, that details one of the most pervasive and bizarre conspiracy theories out there: that the US government in general, and FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in particular, are laying plans to kill us all.

Code ICD 9 E 978 Makes Execution by Guillotine Legal Under Obamacare. The specific code sent to me will make any American’s hair stand up on the back of their neck. The code is ICD 9 E 978. After reading this code I decided that it was my duty to investigate further and get to the bottom of why we have a medical code in the United States for “Legal Execution.” The Jesuits are behind most conspiracies and this one is no different… Execution by Guillotine is painless.

And I’m thinking: what the fuck does Obamacare have to do with this? Was that just something extra to throw in, along with the Jesuits for some reason, the way that the anti-GMO crowd will throw in the name “Monsanto” as a stand-in for Hitler?

At least they tossed us the cheerful tidbit that getting your head sliced off is painless. I’m relieved, actually, considering what other methods they could have chosen.

Man-made climate change paved the way for American scientists to come up with the idea of weather modification. They reasoned that if daily human activity was already impacting weather patterns, it was acceptable for them to deliberately change the weather for a variety of purposes.

The first meeting about weather modification was held at the end of 1945. At this time, the possibility of using several weather manipulation schemes to America’s advantage during war was discussed. Later, during the Cold War, funds were poured into further research on the topic. This opened the door for using the weather as a secret weapon against enemies. Unfortunately, it also created the opportunity for several people and institutions to use this technology for more sinister purposes. Naturally, this topic is taboo within government organizations, but this hasn’t stopped the theories and even evidence of different “climate engineering events” from popping up all over the Internet.

10 • Hurricane Sandy Was An Engineered Superstorm

Many believe that Hurricane Sandy was a product of man-made climate change. Then there are those who believe that the storm itself was man-made. The storm was not even over yet when conspiracy theories started flying around. It is said that President Barack Obama engineered the superstorm that slammed into the eastern seaboard just a week before elections were due to take place to ensure his reelection. Proponents of the theory conclude that Obama needed a situation in which he could be the “hero,” helping those in need and ultimately proving he was the best candidate for president.

Conspiracy or not, Hurricane Sandy certainly seemed to help Obama’s presidential bid. He even won over Republican governor Chris Christie, who commented that he “kept every promise he made” when the hurricane struck. Christie declared at a press conference that although he disagreed with the president on principles and policy, he had no regrets working with him, a statement for which the governor received considerable backlash. It fueled rumors of an engineered storm, as it seemed that Obama was out to get even the opposition into his corner.

How would a human even be able to engineer a hurricane? If you believe the theories, it would be possible with the help of The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government research arm that studies the upper atmosphere. It is believed that HAARP was instrumental in creating Sandy with electromagnetic waves and its SBX platform. Conspiracy theorists are also convinced that Hurricane Katrina was created and steered by HAARP under the order of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Naturally, HAARP denies any involvement.

9 • The Lynmouth Flood Was Caused By Cloud-Seeding

In 1952, 90 million tons of water swept through Lynmouth, a village in Devon. The disaster claimed the lives of 35 people, and 430 lost their homes. It was deemed an “act of God” and a terrible tragedy. However, rumors began to surface that rainmaking experiments may have been to blame for the excessive flooding. It was estimated that the Lynmouth region received 252 times their usual rainfall during the flooding, and it happened within a week of the rainfall experiments undertaken by the Royal Air Force.

It may seem like a creepy coincidence, but it appears to be just that. Experts noted that while rainmaking experiments did indeed take place, only individual cumulus clouds were injected with iodide or dry ice. This led to accelerated rainfall that lasted only about 20 minutes. Furthermore, the flood was not confined to Lynmouth. Heavy showers were reported all over West and South Wales.

8 • Operation Popeye

Monsoon season in Vietnam is bad enough without interference from government, but during the Vietnam War, the American government attempted to extend monsoon season by at least 30 days by seeding the clouds over the area with silver and lead iodide. This top secret campaign was known as Operation Popeye and ran from 1967–1972. It allegedly focused on increasing rainfall over the resupply routes in the area, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The plan was kept under wraps until 1971, when a reporter uncovered a memo secretly sent to President Johnson. The memo contained the following message: “Laos operations—Continue as at present plus Pop Eye to reduce the trafficability [sic] along infiltration routes & Authorization requested to implement operational phase of weather modification process previously successful tested and evaluated in some area.”

The reporter, Jack Anderson, wasted no time in bringing this information to the public. This ultimately led to the proposal of a treaty between the US and other governments to prohibit the use of weather modification technology during wartime. The ENMOD (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques) was signed in 1976 by a host of UN members, ensuring that all forms of weather manipulation are only used for peaceable means.

7 • Yellow Rain

The Hmong people sided with the US during the Vietnam War. This was not taken lightly by the countries of Vietnam and Laos, who declared a different kind of war on the Hmong tribes: chemical warfare. Witnesses described seeing yellow-colored rain falling from the sky that had an oily texture and seemed to cling to whatever it landed on. Others reported seeing helicopters flying low over the land and spraying the oily liquid over the area.

It seemed that the “yellow rain” had some form of acid in it. Many who came into contact with it claimed to have had seizures, and others even alleged that it blinded them permanently. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, similar statements were made by the Cambodian people.

Interestingly enough, it seems that experts have now concluded that yellow rain was, in fact, the feces of honeybees, making all of the above just an elaborate conspiracy theory. It was also concluded that the toxins found in the yellow rain were naturally produced by fungi in the bee feces.

6 • The California Drought Was Caused By Geo-Engineering

In May 2013, a state of drought was declared in California that persisted throughout the rest of the year, the state’s driest year to date. In December, a massive wildfire broke out near Big Sur, thought to have been spurred by the dry spell. More than 900 acres of land were destroyed in the blaze. The drought continued into 2014.

The logical explanation given by scientists was that the drought was the result of global warming, man-made climate change, or both. Conspiracy theorists are not buying it, though. They are convinced that geo-engineering is to blame for the drought. According to theorists, geo-engineers have cut the rainfall in California with the continuous spraying of aerosols and use of ionosphere heating. By turning California into a desert, its citizens will be at the mercy of the government to supply food they can no longer provide for themselves, leaving the government in total control of the population.

Proponents of the theory are even going as far as to say that there is no natural weather anymore. They believe that continued geo-engineering has caused the planet’s natural climate system to stop functioning. Now, the geo-engineers are simply making up weather patterns as they go along, hurtling America into a state of weather warfare.

On January 30th, as the South and East of the US were shaking off the effects of a monster cold wave (the second major storm that month, in fact) videos starting popping up on YouTube purporting that the snow that had fallen in said storm was not snow at all, but actually a synthetic chemical spray meant to look like snow, but delivered via artificial weather for evil purposes.

The videos, dozens of them in all, had titles like “Georgia Fake Snow!!!” and “FAKE SNOW being Reported all over the U.S. SINCE WHEN DOES SNOW TURN BLACK????” and “Fake Snow that won’t melt is really Nanobots 2014.” Soon, regular conspiracy blogs like Before It’s News ran with it. What these clips showed was, admittedly, pretty strange. People would go outside, grab a handful of snow, ball it up, take it back inside, take a lighter to it…and it didn’t melt. Instead, it turned black. And the video-makers complained of a plastic smell.

This chemical-laden, non-burning, plastic “snow” could only be nefarious geoengineering at work, a New World Order false flag attempt to control our climate and our minds and our freedom through HAARP and the chemtrails that the globalist controllers and their minions relentlessly spray around the world and around the clock, all designed to keep us docile and slumbering sheeple who won’t question being sickened and fattened and loaded down with toxins and GMOs and vaccines and toxic GMO vaccines and false flags and crisis actors and Agenda 21 and propaganda and aspartame and Monsanto and all of it ending with a guillotine blade and a plastic tub AND A FEMA DEATH CAMP!!!!! AHHGGHHHH!!! RUN!!! OPEN YOUR EYES!!! DO YOUR RESEARCH!!!!

Or, you know, it’s science.

Really, really basic science.

Mick West, the chemtrail skeptic who founded metabunk.org jumped on this nonsense right away, and posted a simple, really sound explanation for why the snow in the videos blackened and didn’t turn into water. I’ll quote it here:

A) The snow is melting, but the very loose fluffy structure of the snow wicks away the water, turning dry snow into wet snow, and eventually turning the snow into slush.

B) The snow is blackened when a lighter is held underneath it because of the soot from the lighter (the products of incomplete combustion). It’s not burning.

C) The smell is fumes from the lighter (also from incomplete combustion) and/or people briefly burning nearby objects like gloves.

So, there you go. Other than being a pretty good example of why basic science education is so important, these videos show nothing even remotely unusual.

Every hurricane, typhoon, tornado, heat wave, flood, drought and blizzard can thus be traced without any thought by conspiracy theorists to the Air Force site, not far from the Tok Cut-Off, just east of the Richardson Highway. Nothing can stop the tsunami of HAARP hysteria, which complicates the matter of discussing its future.

The $290 million facility is a vestige of the Sen. Ted Stevens earmark era in Alaska, valued by scientists from the military and many of America’s leading universities, who see it as a “cosmic plasma laboratory without walls,” with implications not only for the military but also for basic science and communications.

The interaction of solar radiation with the outer edges of the atmosphere creates the ionosphere, a region that begins about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface that is central to understanding, improving or inhibiting electronic communications, as military leaders told Stevens. The Navy wanted HAARP so it could learn to communicate with submarines worldwide, while the Air Force tried to discover how satellites could be protected from destruction after a high-altitude nuclear blast or powerful magnetic storm.

Today, the biggest change on the horizon for HAARP is back down on earth — the quiet announcement by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) that it wants to pull the plug.

The government’s mind control machine called HAARP!If you don’t believe HAARP can control your mind that’s because the government is usingHAARP to control your mind – causing you to not believe HAARP can control your mind. Seriously.

President Obama held a press release which denied Snowden’s accusation that the US was engaging in chemtrail and HAARP activity to the detriment of the climate in other parts of the world.

WASHINGTON — Recent revelations from Snowden outlined a complex cloud weather modification project carried out by the classified High Altitude Auroral Research Project (HAARP) and the Jet Fuel Cloud Seeding Program (JFCSP) commonly known as Chemtrails. Wednesday, President Obama stunned the public in a press release admitting to decades of classified weather modification by the United States and promised to establish a permanent international independent oversight committee.

President Obama shocked the world with candid words, “Hundreds of countries are carrying out weather modification programs, and we’re doing it better than any of them. However, this has been secret for too long. The American People need to know about what we do to make sure our children have something to eat each and every year. It’s true we need more oversight for geoengineering projects, so I’ve signed an executive order establishing an international third party oversight group to not only investigate for abuse but also to keep the public informed about new and existing geoengineering programs.”

President Obama addressed the tough topic head-on, building a strong case for the weather modification programs while refuting concerns from activists, saying, “Geoengineering is necessary for our country’s agricultural industries and keeps millions of Americans employed every year. Our efforts in high altitude microwave technology at HAARP combined with the innovations in cloud seeding technology introduced by the jet fuel industry gives the American People a level of control over the elements unprecedented in the history of mankind. American Scientists are quickly approaching capabilities which will not only curb global climate change, but also to put an end to disastrous hurricanes and typhoons. For decades these programs have been kept secret out of concern for national security, but I have decided there is no need to keep this program a secret. Sensational reports that the United States will exist in a ‘bubble’ as the rest of the world heats up uncontrollably have no basis in scientific fact.”

Modern conspiracy movements come and go so quickly that it can be hard to keep up with the new threats and concepts that get tossed around social media and the water cooler. So here’s a quick and easy list of some of the basic ideas you’ll often see related to conspiracy theories and popular pseudoscience. And because everyone likes pedantic, grade-school learning tropes, I did it in the form of the alphabet.

A is for Agenda 21, a non-binding and unenforceable United Nations policy paper written over two decades ago, devoted to promoting sustainability and smart growth. Some conspiracy theorists, at the prompting of Glenn Beck, have decided that Agenda 21 is actually a plot to depopulate rural areas, enact a green genocide and cram the survivors into Soviet-style urban clusters. It’s really not, and you can read the “sinister plan” for yourself online.

B is for Bankster, a portmanteau of “banker” and “gangster.” This term has caught on as a reference to the wealthy financiers and global elites who are supposedly controlling every element of society and government, enslaving the rest of us through their octopus tentacles of Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Government. Often, the term is modified as “foreign bankster,” which usually just means “Jews.”

C is for Chemtrail, a spray of noxious chemicals, biological agents meant to control the population, weather modification material or unspecified “toxins” left behind by airplanes acting under the control of the global elite. No compelling evidence of chemtrails exists, and almost everything used as proof of them is either fake or out of context. In reality, “chemtrails” are either contrails left by aircraft when the heat of their exhausts meets cold air, or simply unusual looking clouds.

D is for Denialism. No matter what beliefs are held by the mainstream and supported by solid evidence, you can always find someone who thinks we’re being lied to about them. Everything from the existence of AIDS to the moon landings to vaccine safety has an accompanying movement that says “everything we know is wrong” about these subjects, usually with nothing to prove it. Most of these movements are tied together, because if you’re going to be contrarian, you might as well be really contrarian.

E is for Energy. Many conspiracy theorists believe there is a massive plot by the government and oil companies to suppress free energy machines, which would break the oil industry’s grip on us and deliver unlimited power. As evidenced by the free availability of patents and myriad videos showing the non-existent miracles worked by these machines, this is not true. The laws of physics dictate that free energy can not exist, so there is no need to suppress it.

F is for False Flag. In political terms, a false flag is an action fabricated as a pretext for war. False flags are real things that have happened, but conspiracy believers see them in virtually every terrorist attack and shooting of the last century, all done as a pretext for Bankster-controlled politicians to make money and take away our rights. One false flag consistently cited by conspiracy theorists is Operation Northwoods, a US plan to gin up a war with Cuba. It was pooh-poohed by President Kennedy and never implemented.

HAARP, complete with SINISTER CLOUDS.

G is for Geoengineering. Like false flags, geoengineering is a real thing that has been turned into something else by conspiracy theorists. They see geoengineering as a way the global elite will reshape the planet to enslave us and keep us sick, using chemtrails, “weather warfare” and man-made natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes. In reality, geoengineering is being studied as a way to reverse the effects of climate change (see Denialism.)

H is for HAARP, short for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. This was a research station in Alaska that used high frequency antennae to bounce radio signals off the ionosphere. Some see HAARP as a powerful weapon capable of weather modification, earthquakes, massive storms and electromagnetic blasts. HAARP has no such actual powers and ionospheric research has no relation to earthquakes or hurricanes. In addition, HAARP closed in March 2013, due to funding issues.

I is for Illuminati, a catch-all term for almost anyone wealthy, powerful or wealthy and powerful. Historically, the Bavarian Illuminati was a secret society founded in 1776 to oppose religious influence over secular life. It lasted less than a decade before being banned. The pop culture version of the Illuminati was remade from a combination of antisemitism, anti-Communism and fear of One World Government. No evidence exists that this Illuminati is real, despite virtually every celebrity, executive and politician posited to be a member.

Alex Jones: wrong pretty much all the time about pretty much everything.

J is for Jones, Alex. The popular radio host, film producer and founder of conspiracy clearing house Infowars.com is seen as the “face” of the conspiracy theory movement. Jones helped mainstream the view that a cadre of governments and businesses serve as a global elite, running the planet for their own benefit. His media platforms are a haven for those looking to “wake up” the rest of us to what’s “really going on,” despite being wrong pretty much all the time about pretty much everything. He’s also really entertaining to watch be interviewed.

K is for Kennedy, John, the center of a 50 year conspiracy theory regarding his assassination. Dozens of ideas have been put forth as to who “really” killed JFK, from the CIA to the Corsican Mafia to a nebulous group of businessmen to a Secret Service agent to Jackie Kennedy. Despite the weight of research on the subject (as many as 2,000 different books alone) and the staggering percentage of Americans who reject the “official story,” no theory has emerged with enough compelling evidence to displace Kennedy being shot by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.

L is for Logical Fallacies, the poor arguments used in an attempt to make points lacking supporting evidence. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the many fallacies used against skepticism, such as the Gish Gallop (238234 Reasons Vaccines Are Evil, And You Can’t Possibly Respond to Them All), the argument from authority (we should listen to Dr. Oz about nuclear power because he’s a doctor) and post hoc rationalization (I caught the flu after I got the flu shot, therefore the flu shot did it). Good lists of fallacies can be found here and here.

The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project(HAARP), known for it’s Ionospheric Research Instrument(IRI), is a High Frequency(HF) antenna array using radio transmission as a manner of heating atmospheric layers. With it’s 18 different instruments HAARP performs ionospheric research by means of transmitting and receiving HF radio waves, using the IRI to transmit and the rest for either radar detection or receiving atmospheric data. The projects construction began in 1993, was completed in 2007, and is located in Gakona, Alaska. HAARP is one of many scientifically open source IRIs which grabs the attention of researchers, universities, students, militaries, defense programs and conspiracy theorists alike. Perhaps many people may become confused when reading the terms ‘open source’ and ‘HAARP’ within the same sentence, after reading this article, with hope, that confusion should end.

Conspiracy Theory Origins

The origination of the HAARP conspiracy theories all began in 1993 when a man named Nick Begich had read a notice about HAARP in a conspiracy magazine named Nexus. He went on to write a popular book published in 1995 titled Angels Don’t Play This HAARP. This book seems to intentionally convince the public that all theoretical uses for HAARP were already possible and/or in action during the time of it’s writing. Unfortunately, for the book, the theories described in it’s text are just that, untested assumptions of just what a device of this nature may be able to do. It was, after all, self published in 1995 a mere two years after the initial prototype IRI had been established.

The military document titled Owning The Weather was a conceptual theoretical layout for what IRI devices may one day be capable of, little did the military know that this unclassified document would spark conspiracy theories across the globe. It seems that even the government of Russia had become concerned of the capabilities of this device. In the year 2002 a Russian news media site revealed that even the Russian Federation believed the conspiracy theory that HAARP can affect the weather! In September of 2002 the Russian parliament addressed the United Nations with their concerns as to the possibility of geo-physical weapons, they were suggesting the global ban of HAARP.

The largest propagators of HAARP conspiracy theories were, of course, none other than public mass media propaganda and entertainment. HAARP conspiracy theories have been propagated by local newspapers, CBC, by other leaders such as Hugo Chavez, the very first episode of Jesse Ventura’s show Conspiracy Theory, countless made for television documentaries and hundreds of other sources. Conspiracy theorists all over the internet also spread the mainstream media HAARP propaganda, which seems contradictory to the normal work of a conspiracy theorist. It’s highly unfortunate that most sources spreading this propaganda have no idea that HAARP has never had any classified experiments take place there, university students studying radio were able to attend workshops at HAARP every summer and learn about the equipment.

Scientists need not apply for membership in the Chemtrail Conspiracy. In fact, scientists will probably be booted out for even walking on the same street where the meeting is being held. That’s because scientists would shine a light into the utter darkness of this nutty conspiracy. According to Wikipedia:

The chemtrail conspiracy theory holds that some trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by various government officials.[1] This theory is not accepted by the scientific community, which states that they are just normal contrails, as there is no scientific evidence supporting the chemtrail theory.

Okay, so does it make sense to you that millions of people are involved in some bizarre worldwide conspiracy that involves every level of government, the military, the medical community, meteorologists, scientists AND private industry in numerous countries simultaneously, and not ONE has ever become a whistle blower? Not ONE has ever gone public with PROOF?

Like all conspiracy theories, chemtrails require us to accept the existence of a coverup of mammoth proportions. In this case, virtually every aircraft maintenance worker at every airport in the world needs to be either part of the conspiracy, or living under a threat from Men in Black, with not a single whistle blower or deathbed confession in decades. Or that for all the thousands of traditional media outlets around the world that have the resources and willingness to do solid investigative journalism, not a single one has dredged up as much as a single provable fact that this isn’t just a self-inflicted mass delusion?

Come on – this chemtrail stuff is so wacky it makes creationism and Scientology look smart. But hey, silliness was never a barrier to joining the tin foil hat brigade:

Due to the popularity of the conspiracy theory, official agencies have received thousands of complaints from people who have demanded an explanation. The existence of chemtrails has been repeatedly denied by scientists around the world, who say the trails are normal contrails. The United States Air Force states that the theory is a hoax which “has been investigated and refuted by many established and accredited universities, scientific organizations, and major media publications.” The United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has stated that chemtrails are not scientifically recognized phenomena.

In case you wonder where all those folks who believed in the Mayan apocalypse have gone, look no further. They’re filling the internet with more pseudoscientific-conspiracy drivel about how the government is trying to sterilize you, pacify you, experiment on you, make you sick, control the weather, vaccinate you, infect us with nanobot implants, fight global warming, cause global warming, geo-engineering, or make us mindless slaves to the New World Order – or maybe a combination of them, since no two conspiracy theorists seem to agree on WHY anyone would do this (let alone how).

But the wingnuts are True Believers even if what they believe in is clearly outside the realm of common sense:

So here we are in 2012 and the level of verifiable evidence of Chem Trails and their effect on humanity is staggering, and as more of us become more sophisticated , more awake , more expanded in our ability to see the larger picture , we are starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together as to “Why” they are doing this.

The reason of course is money , profits, and control , so nothing new here, just more sophisticated control mechanisms to manipulate markets, food sources and ultimately the ability to produce food. It turns out that the main reason for the development of weather modification , Chem Trails, HAARP , is to create a situation that puts normal crops at a sever disadvantage through droughts and other extreme weather.

Experts on atmospheric phenomena deny the existence of chemtrails, asserting that the characteristics attributed to them are simply features of contrails responding differently in diverse conditions in terms of the sunlight, temperature, horizontal and vertical wind shear, and humidity levels present at the aircraft’s altitude. Experts explain that what appears as patterns such as grids formed by contrails result from increased air traffic traveling through the gridlike United States National Airspace System’s north-south and east-west oriented flight lanes, and that it is difficult for observers to judge the differences in altitudes between these contrails from the ground. The jointly published fact sheet produced by NASA, the EPA, the FAA, and NOAA in 2000 in response to alarms over chemtrails details the science of contrail formation, and outlines both the known and potential impacts contrails have on temperature and climate. The USAF produced a fact sheet as well that described these contrail phenomena as observed and analyzed since at least 1953. It also rebutted chemtrail theories more directly by identifying the theories as a hoax and denying the existence of chemtrails.

I suppose people who can readily believe that crop circles are alien messages, aliens crashed at Roswell, or that flu vaccines cause autism, can believe in chemtrails. Once you start drinking the pseudoscience Kool-Aid, it’s hard not to drain the glass and ask for more.

Major disasters attract major attention. Whenever a plane crashes or a hurricane makes landfall, the event draws international news coverage and countless internet postings. Most of the time, people take experts at face value when they try to explain the science behind why a certain event happened, but for a small and vocal segment of society, the “truth” is hardly that at all. Enter the conspiracy theorists.

No matter how silly or factually incorrect they seem, conspiracy theories represent a very real strain of thought. Most of these theories involve politics – President John F. Kennedy’s assassination is perhaps the most famous example – or other seemingly curious events, such as the “Roswell UFO incident” back in 1947. But some of these theories challenge very basic science.

The two main weather control conspiracy theories revolve around the thought that the United States government controls the weather through a technology called HAARP, as well as airplane-produced “chemtrails.”

The purpose of HAARP was to determine how the ionosphere, or the upper layers of the atmosphere, affects radio signals, with the ultimate goal of helping to develop more advanced radio communication technology. The project accomplished this by transmitting “a 3.6 MW signal, in the 2.8–10 MHz region of the HF (high-frequency) band, into the ionosphere,” which was then studied by various instruments on the ground to see how the ionosphere affected these radio communications.

Conspiracy theorists beg to differ. A quick Google search (which returns over 7,000,000 hits) shows that HAARP has been blamed for pretty much everything bad that’s happened since the mid-1990s – terrorist attack, car accidents, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, nightmares, toothaches, bad dates, you name it – but the project is most popularly associated with its alleged “weather control” capabilities.

Several popular for-profit websites claim that they have hardware that can detect HAARP-generated energy across the contiguous United States and that severe weather will occur where these “hot spots” show up on their detectors. I’ve made a point of clicking over to these HAARP weather websites near several predicted severe weather outbreaks this year, and found that the so-called HAARP activity maps always show up a few hours after the weather models are run and the Storm Prediction Center releases their latest forecasts. Funny, that.

Before the project was suspended due to lack of funds, the University of Alaska ran HAARP’s official website, but the website no longer works as of early August. The site had the array’s exact address (Google Maps even shows that the array is located off of “H.A.A.R.P. Access Road”), pictures, information, and even several 24/7 webcams focused on the arrays with a beautiful view of the mountains in the background. The large amount of openness surrounding HAARP takes the wind out the argument that the government conducted this project in secret, like many HAARP theorists assert.

HAARP does not and cannot control the weather. While the frequencies are high powered, it doesn’t have nearly enough energy to do anything over the Lower 48, let alone specifically target communities for destruction like one would see in a science fiction movie. Both common sense and a basic understanding of meteorology debunk the conspiracy theory surrounding HAARP’s alleged ability to control the weather. But what about something closer to home; say, right above us?

Is there something sinister in airplane contrails?

Contrails, short for condensation trails, form when the hot, moist exhaust from aircraft flying at high altitudes condenses when it meets the extremely cold upper atmosphere and forms a long, narrow cirrus cloud. Contrails can make for a beautiful sky, especially during sunrise or sunset, and are indicative of particularly cold air aloft.

Contrails are harmless (as they consist of water vapor) and tend to stick around for minutes or hours, depending on how favorable the atmosphere is for sustaining such clouds. Conspiracy theorists, however, call these innocuous contrails something more sinister – “chemtrails.”

They believe that contrails are really trails of chemicals (hence the name) sprayed by aircraft for nefarious purposes, usually to control the weather, make us sick, control our minds, or cause general mischief.

The idea that aircraft that produce contrails are really spraying “chemtrails” is preposterous on its face.

I like to tweak conspiracists for their lack of research. Many conspiracists subjugate any form of critical thinking to their overhwleming desire to believe nonsense. If they see something they want to believe, they just believe it without lifting a finger to investigate the truth.

Here is an example from the last few days: Go to google and do a search for Snowden HAARP (or just click the link).

As of right now (Saturday, July 13, 2013 @ 10:29 PM EST) i come up with over 279,000 results! That’s a lot of results for a story that was originally written only 3 days ago by the originating website. News like this spreads very quickly across the loon sites.

So what does this story purport? Well, from the conspiratorial website Secrets of the Fed comes this quote from the story:

MOSCOW, Russia – Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower and fugitive, released documents Tuesday to Internet Chronicle reporters proving that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, is definitively engaged in a program of assassination and mind control.

While the military prison industrial complex has routinely insisted that the Alaskan-based HAARP is only meant to study natural phenomena in earth’s ionosphere, Snowden has managed to blow open a brutally massive charade.

“The HAARP research station,” he said, “strategically based away from prying eyes near Gakona, Alaska, is actually used to terminate or manipulate would-be dissidents of global capitalism on the scale of millions of people.”

Added Snowden, using finger quotes, “With these terrestrial antennas, NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] is able to, on a global scale, remotely silence ‘perpetrators’ of ‘deviant or subversive’ strains of thought.”

Unbeknownst to victims or their loved ones, HAARP projects ultra-high-powered radio waves. Those waves operate at the same electronic frequency as the truncus encephali, or brain stem, selectively inducing deaths seemingly by natural causes – including by some appearing to coroners as innocuous as strokes or heart attacks.

“When and if the intelligence community doesn’t view outright assassination as an optimal effect,” said Snowden, “‘they’ can simply make a ‘target’ act in an insane fashion, in order to discredit them. When we were in transit between Hong Kong and Moscow, WikiLeaks staff and I had to fend off the constant threat of radio-generated homicidal delusions.”

This is super crazy stuff isn’t it?

But there is ONE BIG CATCH to this story!

Are you ready for the truth?

THE. STORY. IS. FAKE!

You read correctly. The story is a fake! It originated at a site called Internet Chronicle – where their stories are satirical in nature a la The Onion!!!

This gets back to my original point: Many conspiracists are blinded to logic and critical thinking because their desire to believe their delusions simply overwhelms their ability to think.

What really has me scratching my head is, the story was repeated across the web with the original source (Internet Chronicle) contained in the retelling of the story. For example this is how the story was retold at Secrets of the Fed:

Another face-palm clue was the caption used below a picture of Snowden (to the right) in the original story at the Internet Chronicle. “Snowden speaking from a Custom Faraday Cage in Sheremetyevo Airport’s Hotel Novotel.” A custom Faraday cage? LOL! Okay, this is a double-face-palm clue.

Bottom line is, it would have taken all of two seconds for any of those 279,000 sites found in the Google results to check this story. Chalk up at least 279,000 fails for conspiracists.

The power of confirmation bias. And conspiracists wonder why they don’t have any credibility.

As i travel the dark corridors of the conspiratorial world i have found HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) to be one of the most often cited causes of everything not understood. Was there an earthquake? Blame HAARP! What about that hurricane? Blame HAARP! Is your neighbor acting weird? HAARP is controlling his mind!!!

Could HAARP antennas be generating earthquakes? Eric Dubay, a conspiracy blogger and American ex-pat that lives in Thailand, is part of the crowd that believes the U.S. used HAARP to cause the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March 2011, leading to the devastating Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown.

The gist of the argument from Dubay and others is that waves generated by HAARP antennas are focused on a specific part of the ionosphere with enough force to make the entire thing buckle into space; the ionosphere snaps back toward the ground with enough precision to cause a massive earthquake that devastates a strategic target that furthers American economic and defense interests.

Others claim the U.S., for bizarre reasons mostly unsubstantiated, caused the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The best guess anyone has come up with is that Haiti was the perfect place for a test run of sorts, which is among 13 reasons included in a post on Godlike Productions that argues the U.S. should be suspected for causing the quake in Port au Prince. A column by another conspiracy theorist on UFO-Blogger.com goes a step further in trying to predict what will be hit next: “Most likely the next target will be the New Madrid fault line in the South- Midwestern United States.”

There’s a storied tradition of blaming devastating hurricanes on HAARP. That trend hit a fever pitch in 2005: first it was Katrina, then Rita, then Wilma.

[ . . . ]

“This is absolute hogwash,” Stanford professor Umran InantoldPopular Science. “There’s absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the earth’s [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it’s miniscule compared with the power of a lightning flash — and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP’s intensity is very small.”

Mind Control

Of all the conspiracies floating around about HAARP, this is perhaps the most entertaining, and scientifically farfetched.

The government is using the shortwave radio communication generated in Gakona, so the story goes, to control the minds of unsuspecting Americans.

Northern Exposure: With HAARP, an antenna array located 200 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, scientists study the outer atmosphere by zapping it with radio waves generated by 3,600 kilowatts of electricity. Appropriately, it has a great view of the aurora borealis. U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

If the paranoid blogosphere is to be believed, every morning a group of plasma-physics grad students wakes up at a research facility in Gakona, Alaska, 200 miles north of Anchorage, and prepares for another day of playing God. It’s cold, dark as a mineshaft in winter, and the day’s work does little to cheer the mood. Depending on the unpredictable agendas of military scientists, this group of technicians must shoot radio waves into the upper reaches of our atmosphere to create missile shields, eviscerate enemy satellites, set off the occasional earthquake, or control the minds of millions of people.

Skywave Propogation: Radio waves travel in straight lines, but the Earth isn’t flat, so sending radio signals to the other side of the world is tricky. HAARP’s findings could lead to ways to extend the range of radio signals by creating irregularities in the ionosphere that would bounce signals across long distances. Paul Wootton

The truth is, though, that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP—the 180-antenna array that became fully operational (in 2007) when the defense-systems contractor BAE finished installing transmitters—is nothing more sinister than a research station. And now, 15 years after construction on the station began, HAARP’s managers are seeing what the fully powered system can do; most recently, they’ve begun zapping the moon with the hope of determining the composition of its soil. “It’s up, it runs, it performs beautifully,” says Ed Kennedy, the former HAARP program manager for the Naval Research Lab. “HAARP is a great example of a project that from start to finish stayed on schedule and on budget.”

HAARP’s purpose is to study the ionosphere (the section of the atmosphere beginning about 50 miles up in which ultraviolet radiation temporarily strips atoms of their electrons), the magnetosphere (the region in space above the ionosphere where the Earth’s magnetic field affects the behavior of charged particles) and the Van Allen radiation belts (bands of highly charged particles contained in the magnetosphere beginning some 400 miles up). Scientists are interested in the ionosphere because of its ability to affect radio signals; the Van Allen belt, because the radiation there damages satellites, and a better understanding of it could lead to ways to make satellites last longer. “It’s an open plasma-physics laboratory,” says Dennis Papadopoulos, a physics professor at the University of Maryland who helped conceive the idea for HAARP with the Naval Research Lab more than 30 years ago. “You test ideas and scientific theories. Then, if something’s important to the Department of Defense, you apply it.”

Ionospheric Manipulation Made Easy: HAARP’s ionospheric research instrument comprises 180 aluminum antenna towers [1] on a 40-acre plot. Together the towers beam radio waves into the ionosphere, which begins about 50 miles up. There, sunlight temporarily strips gas molecules [2] of their electrons, creating charged particles [3]. Scientists tweak HAARP’s signal [4] to stimulate reactions in the lower ionosphere, causing phenomena such as radiating auroral currents, a.k.a. “virtual antennas,” which send extremely low-frequency waves back to Earth. The waves can reach deep into the ocean and could improve submarine communication. At night, the absence of sunlight causes the lowest layer of the ionosphere to temporarily disappear [5]. This allows HAARP to conduct experiments that could lead to better ways to use a process called skywave propagation. Paul Wootton

One application government scientists are particularly interested in is turning the lower ionosphere into a tool for broadcasting radio signals or bouncing them around the curvature of the Earth. By beaming a signal ranging from 2.8 to 10 megahertz into the ionosphere and then pulsing the signal, HAARP stimulates what’s called a “virtual antenna”—a radio interaction that causes the ionosphere to send a very low-frequency signal back down to Earth. The phenomenon could theoretically improve submarine communication. Because salty, conductive seawater absorbs high-frequency radio waves, submarines currently operate with wires that reach up into shallow depths to receive usable radio signals. Low-frequency signals like the ones HAARP generates in the ionosphere could allow subs to operate at much deeper depths. “It’s a real signal that comes from space as though there were an antenna up there,” says Paul Kossey, HAARP program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate. “But there’s no wire doing it.”

Of course, a vocal minority of HAARP-watchers have their own ideas about the purpose of the $230-million, taxpayer-funded antenna array . . .

Natural disasters can occur anywhere on the planet. Sometimes they’re small scale with no lose of life and relativity little damage. Sometimes they’re huge and kills thousands of people, and even wipe out entire cities an regions.

Most people accept the fact that natural disasters are random, mostly unpredictable, uncontrollable, that there is nothing we can do about them, and that it has been that way since before humans even existed.

But, there are some people out there who do not believe that many of the recent natural disasters over the last few years are actually “natural” in nature, and that many of these natural disasters are actually man-made.

As crazy as it sounds, a lot of people believe that many of our recent natural disaster are actually man-made, false flag attacks (I’m not sure why they would be called that, but for some reason they are) and that the government can control the weather, and even create earthquakes.